Saturday, August 6, 2016

I See: It's Not You Who Is Not Requiting Me, It's Something in You Over Which You Have No Say Says No to Me

I've gardened the blogrolls. Up at three this morning, couldn't sleep (it happens, often), couldn't read (reading makes me want to sleep, often, when I can't sleep), I weeded. Thirty-nine blogs, including a least a few of you who may still read this blog, hadn't updated in at least four months. This is not an accusation; in fact, good for you. Who the fuck but desperate attention sluts maintain a daily blog in 2016? The thirty-nine, removed from the blogroll that housed them, have been moved to Moribund, the blogroll I keep so that if you do update again the updating blogroll will float you to the top so I see you - I get a pleasant surprise every few weeks. Point being, not that you worry whether I blogroll you or not, I didn't kill you.

Yesterday was Acadia and St Sauveur Mountain circuit.

Six straight days of hard hikes, today I'm dropping Earthgirl off at a harbor so she can paint boats, I'm playing 36 at Habana Disc Golf, our bodies need a day off of hauling our fat asses over boulders.

The despair of poor white Americans: The barely veiled implication, whichever version you consider, is that
the people undergoing these travails deserve relatively little
sympathy—that they maybe, kinda had this reckoning coming. Either they
are layabouts drenched in self-pity or they are sad cases consumed with
racial status anxiety and animus toward the nonwhites passing them on
the ladder. Both interpretations are, in their own ways, strikingly
ungenerous toward a huge number of fellow Americans. They are also unsatisfying as explanations for what is happening out
there. Williamson, for one, mischaracterizes the typical Trump voter. As
exit polls show, the candidate’s base is not the truly bereft white
underclass Williamson derides. Those Americans are, by and large, not
voting at all, as I’m often reminded when reporting in places like
Appalachia, where turnout rates are the lowest in the country. People
voting for Trump are mostly a notch higher on the economic ladder—in a
position to feel exactly the resentment that Williamson himself feels
toward the shiftless needy. As for liberals’ diagnosis that a major
public-health crisis is rooted in racial envy, it fails to square with,
among other things, the fact that blacks and Hispanics have hardly been
flourishing themselves. Yes, there’s an African American president, but
by many metrics the Great Recession was even worse for minorities than
for whites.

I'm putting Karamazov on hold - I've read it so many times I can pick it up where I left off without fear of losing the strands - I've downloaded Colson Whitehead's latest, The Underground Railroad, it's next after I finish Elkin's Dick Gibson Show this morning.

From yesterday's drive-around soundtrack (we're up to E song-title-wise: